Introduction

We are taking a step back from healthcare and health insurance to bring you a new series: You’re Doing it Wrong. In this 15-part series we will discuss all the things that the bizdiots do that are counterproductive and raise the cost of their own products and services and consequently the cost to you, dear reader, the consumer. This third installment is a kind of management test that shows that bizdiot thinking is rampant: MBAs with no other “skills” running companies. Do you think Elon could design and build an electric car or a self-driving car or a rocket? Is he a snake-oil salesman extraordinaire? No and yes in that order and now he is the world's first trillionaire, because he trades on hype and has no idea how to actually do anything, besides maybe sell snake oil. I will give him this: he is the best snake oil salesman the world has ever known.

We are taking a break from healthcare because there is no new real news. The AI hype is just getting worse, and will never pan out; the EMR vendors haven't realized that you can't document encounters with text or language; insurance companies rip off everyone, so we are stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. If you need your weekly dose of healthcare, read our article Direct Universal Care (DUC) is the Answer to the Healthcare Finance Crisis.

The Situation

If you can’t do the jobs of the people who report to you, you can’t judge how they go about getting the tasks accomplished. If you have more than three layers of management, you are probably going to fail; the first thing the management consulting companies do is to fire all the middle managers. That means everyone in the company, even the C-Suite has to be a student of the industry they are in. Let’s say you bolt bumpers on a Chevy. To manage a bumper bolter, you have to know how to bolt the bumper yourself. In order to run a chevy plant, you have to know how to not only bolt bumpers, but have at least a passing acquaintance with all the steps in the process. In order to captain the good ship Chevy, you have to have come up from the ranks of “car guys.” There is nothing wrong with having an MBA, but there is nothing right either. It doesn’t give you the experience you need to run a company of any kind. You need boots on the ground experience. Managers are basically worthless. They don’t contribute to the bottom line and they do make bad decisions. Dilbert is a thing for a reason. It’s funny because it is true.

The thing that is worst about bizdiot-style managers is the just-get-it-done attitude. They need some dumb report or to shave hours or materials off a project and make the worst possible decisions based on ignorance and just-get-it-done. Here is another chevy example. Engineers designed a plastic moisture barrier into the inside of the door frames to shunt water to a channel leading outside. Accountants, bizdiots, meddled with the design by saving $0.56 per door and caused the speakers to short out in a year, under warranty of course, completely defeating the savings purpose, the window quit rolling down in three and the door rusted out in five.

Genius.

Let’s talk about the finance bros. for a second. Finance is the purest form of business. The product is money, so being a bizdiot accountant isn’t detrimental to the product. However, we have all heard of the business cycle, where the bizdiots crash the economy every decade because they bet on things they do not understand. The real thing is that there is no business cycle. Business is not cyclical; we just buy into the hype and the snake oil they sell, and we jump on the IPO the bizdiots offer and never seem to figure out that there is no product; it is all hype and crash the economy. The bizdiots get in and get out at the IPO and leave the public holding the bag with no rent money and no insurance. That is what causes the cycle: ignorance and stupidity, not some imaginary being like an Alan Greenspan in the sky that takes trillions out of the economy every decade for no reason.

Now let’s talk about following the leader. Since nobody has any real clue about how to do anything, they all just hire consultants to tell them what to do. The problem with that is that the consultants are worse bizdiots than they are and recommend an ERP like NetSuite or SAP, some Applicant Tracking Systems like Workday, a ticketing system like ServiceNowand a Contact relationship manager (CRM) like Salesforce.

The Logical Conclusion

Businesses run by layers of bizdiot, just-get-it-done, accountant managers either fail, or are only successful because their competition is just as bad. The business puts out suboptimal (when you say that fast it sounds like bad) products that probably started fine or even revolutionary and get wrecked by bizdiots. Or go the other way, and the bizdiots bet on products they don’t understand and make their money on the IPO; there is a reason they call it an exit strategy, and leave the public holding the bag. The logical conclusion is that soon, everything will be finance and MBA bizdiots. There won't be any economy in the US. There will be real estate speculation (like Canada and Australia really) and paper-pushing desk jockeys who contribute nothing and nobody to make the products and consequently nobody to sell them to. Eventually the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.

The Short Answer

Be that guy (or girl) who points out the idiocy and the “logical outcome” of bad decisions. Push back.

The Slightly Longer Answer

In our article You’re Doing it Wrong Part 2: Installed Applications, we detailed a better way to go about most of the larger mistakes the consulting companies and therefore your managers make. Instead of paying for the applications, then basically rewriting them, then supporting and maintaining them, then supporting and maintaining servers or eyewateringly expensive cloud solutions, and then integrating them all together, take those same resources and build your own.

When your accountant wants you to remove that $0.56 piece of plastic from the inside of the door, push back; explain the consequences of that decision and why that was put there in the first place. Always look for the eventual outcome of any decision.

Don’t play into the hype. Ignore the next big thing. Ignore the dot coms and the Big Data and the Blockchain and the Bitcoin and yes, the AI as well. I have made an entire career out of doing nothing in the face of the hype. I have never once been wrong. The only bandwagon I did jump on was Microsoft’s new-for-2009 Model/View/Controller (MVC) architecture. It made sense that what they were doing was just wrong and this was better, so I jumped. It lasted for almost 15 years before being superseded, and is still better than any of the various JavaScript frameworks. Yes it is; fight me.

Conclusions

This one is not as satisfying as usual. Normally we say “we have shown a way to make the world spin better” but this time is a little different. All we really did was to say: ignore the bizdiots and refuse to play their game. Be warned; that is a good way to get unemployed, if you have a job.

Other than that, don’t get pulled into the hype, don’t follow dumb directions; and politely explain the outcomes of dumb directions, and show the better way.

If you are a bizdiot manager, I don't know what to tell you. If you can't do, at least partially, the jobs of the people you manage, enough to make informed decisions; you are the problem. Again; fight me.

If you liked what you read, contact us here, on our site, SentiaHealth.com, our parent company SentiaSystems.com, or send us an email to info@sentiasystems.com or info@sentiahealth.com

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